ESSAY

Elizabeth Lamont, PhD

1920s LMU and the
Flowering of Appalachian
Literature

About two years ago, I received
an email from LMU historian Earl Hess asking me if I’d like to write a few
chapters of a larger LMU history he was planning. My task would be to
explore the role LMU played in the development of three of our most famous
alumni, the Class of 1929’s James Still, Don West, and Jesse Stuart. I
jumped at the chance. As Berea’s George Brosi has marveled, “Never before
or since has such a distinguished group of writers graduated from any
regional institution in the same year.” Indeed, the three form what is
today viewed by regional literary critics as “the headwaters of Appalachian
literature.”

At LMU, Stuart is probably the
best known. A prolific and
internationally celebrated poet, short story writer, and novelist, he was
beloved by millions of Americans, and Esquire magazine’s most
frequently published writer before the Second World War. His phenomenal
success earned him the title of Appalachia’s best-selling author.

James Still, hailed as “The Dean
of Appalachian Literature,” was the recipient of prestigious literary awards
and fellowships too numerous to mention, and as early as the 1930s his
advocates included Robert Frost and Robert Lowell. His novel River of
Earthwas declared a “work of art” by Timemagazine.From
the 1970s on, Still’s exalted position within the Appalachian literary canon
has remained unrivalled.

Don Westspoke through his
poetry, stories, and essays for working-class and Appalachian pride. His
second book of poems, Clods of Southern Earth, is claimed to have
sold more copies than any book of American poetry with the exception of Walt
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.Considered Appalachia’s literary
conscience, West blazed the trails for later generations of
socially-conscious mountain writers.

As enthusiastic as I was about my
new project, however, I had excellent reason to believe that LMU had
littleimpact on the three men’s development as writers.
Regional scholars have been arguing for decades that 1920s LMU was little
more than a “primitive mountain institute” and that it wasn’t until Still,
West, and Stuart embarked on graduate studies with Vanderbilt’s Agrarian
elites that they encountered a cultural milieu valuing and nurturing
students with literary talent and aspirations. While scholars
didacknowledge that West and Stuart
hadbeen inspired by one
teacher at LMU, English professor Harry Harrison Kroll, they observed that
we fired him in Stuart’s and West’s junior year, effectively ending whatever
peripheral role LMU played in their literary development. As for James
Still, conventional wisdom was that the university played
no
role in his development as a writer except for providing him with access to
the library in which he labored as a janitor and—shades of Lincoln—taught
himself late into the night.

My search for the facts began
with the excavation of relevant documents housed in LMU’s archives and those
of more than twenty universities or private collections. And what I turned
up painted a far different picture of 1920s LMU than the scholarship had led
me to expect.

First,
I discovered from LMU publications
written before Kroll’s arrival that university officials were already
taking pains to describe themselves as promoting, among other qualities
associated with Lincoln, the literary genius which inspired the son of a
poor backwoods farmer to write the simplest and most profound statement of
American principle, The Gettysburg Address. But more to the point, LMU
officials and faculty, all largely outsiders, viewed the advancement of
literary culture among southern mountaineers as the most efficient means to
attain their larger goal of “educational uplift.” As a result, they had
their students join literary societies, such as the one Still, Stuart, and
West joined, Grant-Lee -- in lieu of what faculty and administrators at the
time dismissed as “Greek societies with barred doors guarded by snobs.”
Each year, members of LMU’s literary societies competed with one another for
monetary prizes in poetry, fiction, the essay, and oratory, with the winners
honored at formal banquets. More awards were given for literary
achievement than in any other pursuit at 1920s LMU.LMU’s
student newspaper trumpeted opportunities for students to enter national
short story and poetry contests offering thousands of dollars in prizes.
“What is Poetry?” one article in The Blue & Grayasked, “why, it’s
the thought of a god sent to earth to be crucified by men, and resurrected,
and later worshipped by only a few.” When the Jenkin Lloyd Jones Chair of
English Literature was established in 1924, student attendance at the
ceremony was mandatory. There, students were reminded that a love of
literature was vital to the “abundant life, as literature provided blessings
and unexpected resources of pleasure and inspiration amid the struggles and
poverty, the monotony and loneliness, and the ever recurring moods and
sorrows of human life.” The speaker – a visiting minister, mind you -- went
so far as to warn that students remaining indifferent to the literary arts
were doomed to live “stupid and dull lives.”

And LMU’s Class of 1929 seems to
have more or less bought it. According to a poll published in the student
paper, The Blue & Gray,the 38-member class of 1929 voted English
“the most popular course” on campus. Their “favorite author” was
Shakespeare, followed by nobody’s idea of an easy read, Thomas Hardy. So
much for the theory that Still, Stuart, and West would not encounter a
literary environment until they embarked on graduate studies at Vanderbilt.

Photograph by Jackie Walker

But I also learned that the
celebrated Kroll didn’t just appear here, as if by magic. The prolific poet
and short story writer was hired by LMU President R.O. Matthews as part of
his larger mission to professionalize LMU’s faculty in the mid-twenties.
Announcing that the university would begin hiring only professors who were
“trained and equipped not alone to teach an art or science but to be able do
what [they] teach others to do,” Matthews’ philosophy was, at least with
regard to the teaching of creative writing in American colleges and
universities, decades ahead of its time.

Indeed, Kroll’s contract
stipulated that he was not to serve just as an English professor but to
write while on campus, and thus “inspire [his students] by example.”
Intentionally or otherwise, Matthews ensured that, from 1926 to 1928, LMU’s
English program mirrored those at only the most forward-thinking
universities. Not even the Ivy League schools did so at the time, and to
this day, the majority of American colleges do not teach creative writing
courses, much less hire writers-in-residence. As Jesse Stuart recalled,
“For us students, Kroll was the first flesh-and-blood writer we ever met.
When we passed by his house late at night we’d see his light on and him
through the window working furiously on his novel.” For his part, Kroll was
not satisfied to merely model the writing life to his aspiring student
writers. He immediately set to work establishing LMU’s first literary
magazine, Lyrics from LMU. In its
introduction, the rural
proletarian Kroll’s respect for his Appalachian students is obvious. “The
students whose work goes into this little volume are mountain boys and
girls,” he wrote. “That they possess ability and marked promise will be
evident. . . . Best of all, they typify the mountain spirit that knows no
superior save God. Their words grow out of the soil from which they sprang
which has given them a true feeling for beauty.”

Although, like many a writer
before and since, Kroll proved a colorful and even scandalous figure on
campus, he was a true visionary in the teaching of creative writing. His
memoirs, and those of his students, as well as course descriptions in LMU
catalogues from the time, make it evident that Kroll instituted the exact
kind of creative writing workshops at LMU that were being simultaneously
explored at The University of Iowa in the mid-to-late 1920s. Ultimately
Iowa’s experiment gave rise to The Iowa Writers Workshop, which would be
America’s premiere writing program for half a century. LMU fired Kroll for
many reasons, not the least of which was that he wrote a novel here deemed
too racy by others on campus, The Mountainy
Singer,but the
fact remains that from 1926 to 1928 – the Class of 1929’s freshman,
sophomore, and junior years -- LMU’s writing students benefited from cutting
edge creative writing pedagogy, assuming they so chose.

Traditional practice at the time
focused student attention on the imitation of Anglo-American stylistic
touchstones, but Kroll directed LMU’s students’ attention homeward to the
Appalachian experience and language. He ordered Stuart and West, for
example, to write about only the “vital things of their lives . . . the
cabin hearthstones, the mountain burial plots, the camp meetings, blood
feuds, and the mountaineer’s eternal struggle with the earth and seasons.”
He dared them to “write the wildest stories that ever happened” back home so
such tales wouldn’t die, and to write like “folks at home talked.” They
were to crank it out, too, because, as Kroll warned, “Writers learn through
trial and error. Mostly error. Writers learn by writing millions and
millions of words.” Then he requiredthat they send their poems,
stories, and essays to any of the hundreds of agricultural and
church-affiliated magazines then headquartered in Nashville. “Damned,”
wrote Jesse Stuart, if the campus “didn’t bloom in song, like England did in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth” -- especially when word got around campus that
one story could fetch as much money as a week’s worth of labor at the LMU
rock quarry.

But no one twenty years ahead of
his time goes unpunished, and inevitably Kroll ran afoul of his more
traditional-minded LMU colleagues, particularly Lucia Danforth, a cultured
PhD who sponsored a rival writing group on campus that stressed the
traditional study of literary classics and aesthetics. Its student leader,
as it turns out, was none other than James Still. Like Danforth, the
reserved Still considered Kroll’s proletarian emphasis upon the quantity
of writing produced and sold vulgar. In an undergraduate essay, Still
no doubt echoed Danforth’s theories when he insisted that the purpose of
campus writing groups should be to “create within students a desire to
acquire literary taste – one that distinguishes between the good and the bad
in writing.” Only the growing awareness of what made writing good
allowed students to engage in “a spirit of clear and meaningful literary
rivalry,” he argued. In later years, Jesse Stuart claimed that the “great
rivalry” between Danforth and Kroll trickled down to their students and
“divided” the college “into two literary camps,” but it’s hard to know how
much of what he recalled was filtered through the dark lens of his and
Still’s sometimes bitter rivalry in later life. What we can know is that
the Kroll-Danforth rivalry provided LMU’s aspiring writers with something
even the best creative writing schools often fail to: diversity of
literary theory and practice.As such, 1920’s LMU couldnurture
both the aggressively market-driven ethos of Jesse Stuart and James Still’s
more high-brow aspirations.

And what about all that talk
among scholars of James Still locking himself into LMU’s library late at
night so that he might read the best of classic and modern literature on his
own because LMU lacked the faculty qualified to teach him? In a letter to
Jesse Stuart written years after the fact, Still admitted that Danforth’s
frequent loan of books was invaluable to him. Indeed, it turns out that
Danforth’s impressive personal library was housed in a cabin close to LMU
which she’d purchased and nurtured into an idyllic literary retreat she
dubbed The Little Portion. According to Don West’s wife, Connie, a talented
painter and LMU alum herself, Danforth’s art and music-filled log home was a
magnet to students. It no doubt also served as Still’s earliest
introduction to the type of literary rusticity he later so famously created
for himself at the Ambergey Loghouse in Hindman, KY.

Another unsung LMU professor who
greatly influenced Still was the extraordinary Vryling Buffum, a polished
and witty Wellesley graduate who had been close friends with Emily
Dickinson’s sister, Vinnie, and with whom Still remained in touch after
graduation, even visiting her at her home in New England. It was she who
taught Still a course in the History of the English Language, and it was in
her class that the genteel young Alabaman would have first realized that
cultured scholars existed who maintained that “someone else” would have to
“point out” the “defects” of mountain language. “To me,” Buffum wrote, “it
has the charm” and “characteristics” of “Shakespeare’s country.” Buffum
spent her summers at LMU travelling the backwoods in search of Shakespearean
linguistic remnants, a subject about which she lectured at LMU and upon
which she presented papers at regional and national conferences. More to
the point, she found Kentucky’s mountaineers delightful story-tellers, and
she reveled in their humor. The non-Appalachian Still’s respect for and
fascination with mountain life and language demonstrated throughout his long
career shows Miss Buffum’s influence. There is also good evidence that the
first essays he published in national journals were developed from research
Miss Buffum assigned him into the origin of mountain names.

But perhaps the one person at LMU
who most influenced Still’s literary careerwas
English instructor
and librarian Iris Grannis. Taking Still under her wing throughout his
years here, she plucked the slight and bespectacled boy out of LMU’s rock
quarry and secured for him the more appropriate position in the library.
She also co-authored his first attempt at a novel and introduced him to Guy
Loomis, the NY philanthropist and LMU donor who would serve as his patron
for many years, a luxury Jesse Stuart and Don West would never have.
Ironically then, it can be argued that LMU’s influence was of greater
benefit to the writer who always claimed he had to
teach himself in
the library than it ever was for Stuart and West.

LMU also inspired its fledgling
writers by ensuring a steady stream of visiting authors and Appalachian
figures of note, such as Emma Bell Miles, Edwin Markham, May Slone, and
Edwin Mims. Opportunities to edit and write for campus publications beyond
Kroll’s literary magazine also abounded. Jesse Stuart grabbed the
opportunity to become the editor of LMU’s student paper, The Blue
& Gray,
while James Still wrote the Lincolniana section of LMU’s promotional
organ The Mountain Herald.Indeed, Stuart, Still, and West were all
first published at LMU, and it was here that James Still won his first five
literary prizes, staged his first stab at a play, and penned the first of
his writings to be published in a national journal.

So as it turns out, LMU’s
influence upon three young writers who went on to play such seminal roles in
the flowering of Appalachian literature did not end and begin with
the hiring and firing of Harry Harrison Kroll. The fact is that Jesse
Stuart, Don West, and James Still embarked on their Vanderbilt years the
products of a mountain college with its own proud and vibrant
literary culture. Indeed, I’ve turned up so much buried material on the
importance of Still’s, Stuart’s, and West’s LMU days to their literary
careers that a few chapters in Earl’s book would no longer suffice. To tell
the story at all well, I’ve had to begin my own book-length study of the
subject. -e-

The Emancipator Staff

The Emancipator was founded in 1999 by students Ginger
Glenn, Jason Howard, Angie Slater, and Sandy Slater, with
the guidance of faculty advisor Liz Lamont. The journal is
named in honor of President Abraham Lincoln. LMU serves
as a living memorial to the legacy of President Lincoln

LMU is a values-based learning community dedicated to pro-
viding educational experiences in the liberal arts and professional studies. The main campus is located in Harrogate,
Tennessee. For more information about the university, contact the Office of Admissions, at 423.869.6280 oer via email
at admission@lmunet.edu.